Close encounters of the second kind in Stratham

Eight local children in two separate incidents reported UFO encounters in the 1970s — even the Scammans "believe in such things."

Dean Merchant

The New Hampshire Seacoast has long been famous in UFO lore, both for the “incident at Exeter” and as the area of residence for the two most renowned “alien abductees,” Betty and Barney Hill.

Few people, though, may be aware of the incidents in Stratham, close encounters of a second kind that occurred in the 1970s during the last great UFO wave in America.

Eight Stratham children came face to face with the frightening unknown when they were confronted by mysterious aerial crafts that left behind physical trace evidence and etched indelible marks upon their memories.

On a wintry eve in 1971, three Stratham lads fired up their racing snow machines and departed from one of the youth’s Stratham Heights Road homes.

Cutting across the Goodrich Farm fields, the boys turned onto a woods trail leading to Bunker Hill Avenue.

They tooled carefree down the trail, one on a Polaris 2-cycle Star Racer, and as they reached the vicinity of the old Sanderson Gravel Pit, looming just above and nearly touching a high power electrical line was the catalyst to heart-pounding, primal fear — a UFO.

Fleeing the apparition, the youthful trio turned and at full throttle retreated to the safety of the Heights Road home.

One of the boys’ moms, who requested anonymity, recalls, “The boys were white as sheets ... scared to death ... frightened out of their wits ... terrorized!” She adds that “these were boys who did not frighten easily.”

Arriving soon at their door was John Oswald, a NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) UFO investigator of local renown. Both parents remember the interview with Oswald as being eerie.

“He seemed to know what we would say before we spoke, as if he already knew what was in our minds,” they said.

The boys were so uncomfortable they fled the house and interviewer as soon as possible. Dad recalls Investigator Oswald telling them about sensors that his people had set up in New Hampshire, all of which, he said, were triggered off at the precise time of the boys’ encounter.

Peter Geremia of Rye, director of the New Hampshire chapter of MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), as well as a lecturer and UFO investigator, recalls Oswald as a dedicated researcher.

He explains that the sensors Oswald referred to were mechanical measurement devices, simple in nature and very accurate. Data collected through such research as the MADAR (Multiple Anomaly Detection and Automated Recording) project, “suggested a connection between magnetic/electromagnetic anomalies and genuine UFO events.”

John Oswald and David Webb conducted experiments in New Hampshire between November 1970 and September 1972. Oswald’s “magnet variometers” were placed at 13 detector sites. The triggering of the sensors provided physical or trace evidence that collaborated with the boys’ visual sighting.

A few years after the incident, and just up the road, another group of Stratham youngsters experienced their own close encounter of a second kind.

The present Holmgren Road area off Bunker Hill Avenue was back then a favorite sledding spot known by locals as “the old hollow.”

Late on a snowy afternoon Tim Perry, a rough and tumble 10 year old, his sister and three chums were enjoying some fast sledding on the icy hill, when a bright, glaring aerial craft with white, green and red lights alternately flashing, descended onto the field across the road where Bob Wiggin Sr. planted his potatoes.

“It was late afternoon — just getting dark,” says Perry. “We saw a big light all of a sudden. It came out of nowhere, almost noiseless.”

Hearts racing and “out of our minds,” the little band grabbed their sleds and ran for home. “It scared the bejeezus out of us,” says Perry.

Perry recalls the UFO was roundish or slightly footballish, a shape he had never seen in an aircraft.

It was not enormous. “It stayed on the ground for maybe 10 seconds, went up slow, then phoom, it was gone,” he says. It ascended at a 45-degree angle and went from 0 to 10,000 feet in 10 seconds — “that quick.’” The next day a UFO investigator interviewed the young Perrys and viewed the field. Tim recalls that he and his sister were interviewed separately.

“I was in the family kitchen,” he says. “I remember his dark blue pants and light blue shirt, and being apprehensive as a boy would be if answering questions to a policeman.”

Perry says the craft had melted a circular formation in the snowy field, about 50 feet in diameter and marked with weird patterns. He remembers three or four cars at the site and pictures and soil samples being taken. The next day it snowed and the physical tracings were buried beneath a white blanket.

Today, as an engineer, husband and dad Perry can analytically ponder his childhood experience, but his mental parameters remain open to unknown explanations to what he saw decades ago.

Stratham resident Kathleen Marden — niece of Betty Hill, co-author of “Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience: The True Story of the World’s First Documented Alien Abduction,” a trained UFO investigator and for years the director of investigator training with MUFON — says she has heard similar stories about people living in rural farm areas. The UFO sightings and such physical trace evidence as burned or withered grass and soil changes.

Marden knows of another UFO sighting in Stratham but says the information is confidential.

Stratham appears in the MUFON Internet log on Dec. 27, 1998. “A person reports seeing a rectangular shape in the sky that had a bluish light in the center, and a pearl colored light at each end. The witness thought it was an airplane but when it listed to the right, it went left, and when it listed to the left, it went right. It moved behind a church and some trees and that was the last he saw of it.” — NURFORC — National UFO Reporting Center.

Doug Scamman of Stratham’s Bittersweet Farm recalls talk of a UFO sighting just off River Road where his family was living in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

In those days, he says, he and his wife were “working 80 hour weeks and too tired to look for UFOs.” But Scamman acknowledges keeping an eye open to the skies. “I have looked for them a few times,” he says. “I believe in such things.”

He says the River Road sighting was in the field behind the first brown house on the right side of the road.

Peter Geremia tells of UFO waves, and of flaps where an area will experience a plethora of sightings and then never again at the same spot. Queried as to why UFOs may be interested in the Seacoast, Geremia says some researchers believe UFOs seem interested or concerned when a new nuclear power plant is to be built, or in areas affected by weapons and war.

Stratham was in close proximity to the proposed Seabrook Nuclear Power plant and to what was then a strategic air command base in Portsmouth, where nuclear materials were located, during the time frame of the UFO sightings.

He says during the 1970s, when Egypt and Israel were at war, there were reports of commercial Israeli airplanes arriving at Pease with all the passenger seats removed, leading to speculation that they were carrying munitions.

Some people are reluctant to share their own experiences about UFOs, fearing ridicule or the pestering that forever dogged the Hills after the media got wind of their story and made it public.

Recently, Professor Stephen Hawking, speaking at a college in Washington State to commemorate the 50-year history of NASA, acknowledged the likelihood of other life forms in the universe, but questioned why intelligent life forms would only make themselves known to “cranks and weirdos.”

Others, like former president Jimmy Carter, have been forthright in discussing their UFO experiences.

Wikipedia has a site dedicated to Carter’s UFO sighting.

Kathleen Marden says those who wish to make a UFO report to the Mutual UFO Network may easily do so by going to the MUFON Web page, www.mufon.com, where they can fill out a simple form.

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